Four analytics tools to include in your eCommerce toolkit

08.08.20130

The competition between different online stores is fierce today. If you want to succeed as on online merchant there's truly no time wavering and staying in one place. Instead it's good to keep in mind that no online store is perfect after it's done and published. If you choose not to develop the store further, you'll automatically give your competitors the upper hand.

The budget reserved for developing a store shouldn't be wasted on decisions made with your "gut feeling". No matter how good your gut feeling is, development is always more arguable when it's based on actual analytics data. The data from your store forms a well founded basis for any changes made to the store. Moreover, analytics data will help you follow the affect of changes as well comparing different choices you might have made. There's really no point in throwing money away by investing on decisions that are not based on actual analytics data from your store.

Analytics and tracking are therefore areas that should be given special attention. With this in mind we'll present a few valuable tools to be added on each online merchant's toolkit.

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics offers online merchants the most comprehensive tools for store analytics. Analytics gathers information about the visitors as well as the sales of your store presenting this data through numerous reports. For many online merchants Google Analytics presents merely a tool to analyze the amount of visitors. In reality the service offers much more than that. There is loads of detailed information available to base the development of your online store onto.

By analyzing the data gathered by the service it is possible to find out which factors affect the most on your store's performance and which might still need some more attention. Analytics also integrates well on many outside services thus we recommend it to be added and used in all online stores.

2. Comprehensive reports of LianaCommerce platform

In addition to basic reports, LianaCommerce offers many such detailed information that the outside analytics tool providers are not able to offer.The shopping cart report for example offers the opportunity to find out how many shopping carts are abandoned as well as to analyze the reasons behind the abandonment. Outside analytics providers are generally not gathering information about abandoned shopping carts. LianaCommerce's own reporting tools thus offer a great opportunity to tackle those shopping carts that the customer has for one reason or another not finished.

Did you know that 65 % of all shopping carts are abandoned? Our experience has showed that by developing a store the abandoment rate may be lowered even under 30 percent. This in mind an average online store would double their turnover just by lowering the percentage of abandoned shopping carts. LianaCommerce offers a variety of different technical solutions to improve the percentage of finished shopping carts.

3. AddThis

AddThis service enables you to follow shares in social media and add social media share buttons on your online store. In addition the service offers among other things centralized stats of an online store's product shares on social media.

One of the most interesting features of AddThis is the opportunity to follow links that have been shared by copying the links from the address line. Many users don't necessarily click on a social media button showed in a product card but they might instead copy the links straight form the address line and link it forward this way. AddThis adds a personal identifier onto the addresses thus allowing you to follow even such links that would be lost in traditional analytics software. By analyzing your most shared pages you're able to develop your content in such a way that it encourages future sharing.

AddShoppers is a service similar to AddThis but specifically designed for online stores. The basic features are the same as in AddThis. With the help of AddShoppers merchants can utilize discount codes giving potential customers a thank you for sharing a product. AddShoppers also offers statistics showing how social media shares affect sales.

4. Moz

Moz (former SEOmoz) is a service provider that concentrates on internet marketing and offers tools especially for developing search engine visibility. In addition, Moz is about to launch their own analytics tool that promises to offer such marketing development services that have never been seen before. Along side Moz a society has been born of around 300 000 users interested in marketing. The service is well worth looking into for everyone interested in the subject.

From a store keepers point of view Moz's existing tools offer huge possibilities especially in terms of search engine optimization. In many online stores it might be difficult to get an overall picture of what should be developed and what should be done first. Many of the traditional analytics methods might not do the trick because of the huge amount of different product sites. Moz's own tool Rogerbot is mimicking the behaviour of search engine robots and going through the site once a week. In result, the service offers a readable list of SEO related things to develop in priority order.

With Moz's statistics it's possible to see how particular changes made to the store affect different areas of search engine optimization. More importantly, Moz offers the possibility to follow competitors' sites to make sure that you're ahead of them in terms of your search engine visibility. The service also offers the possibility to follow certain keywords to see an overall picture of your store's standings with a particular keyword in different search engines.

Summary

Using analytics as the foundation of your online store's development is a wise choice. Unless you have concrete data to base your development on it's frankly quite impossible to analyze the actual benefits.

However, using analytics to your benefit also requires some skills in reading the analytics right. For this reason we recommend going through the analytics with an expert. If you want to discuss more about eCommerce and digital marketing, please contact Liana Technologies' experts on the area.